A Hardware Accelerated Anti-aliasing Volume Splatting Algorithm

This paper proposes a novel algorithm for anti-aliasing volume splatting on modern PC graphics hardware. By the method, the distance-dependent low-pass filter is introduced to avoid aliasing artifacts during perspective projection. A new screen-space formulation of the filter is derived with distance-dependent footprint. We show a reasonable improvement in the traditional textured splats method by implementing the algorithm using the programmable vertex and pixel shaders of newest graphics processing units (GPU). Moreover, we present a new incremental vertex compression technique which takes advantage of the regular spatial sampling property of data sets and achieves 700 times compression ratio. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm renders up to 3 million splats per second for a frame buffer resolution in 512×512.